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Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a happier medium would be to use a Makefile or something to automatically concatenate a shared header + content + shared footer. Addresses the concerns about maintaining the bits and pieces shared among multiple pages, while at the same time avoiding a lot of the complexity of a full-blown static site generator.

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I don’t think this is as simple as you suggest (because I’ve tried things like it). First, you have to keep track of which documents need the same header/footer (unless all are exactly the same). Second, you have to extract the title from the content somehow. There are a bunch of little steps like these that make it more complex (in my mind) than just writing HTML directly.

> First, you have to keep track of which documents need the same header/footer (unless all are exactly the same)

That should be pretty easy to program into a Makefile.

> Second, you have to extract the title from the content somehow

Or just "cat headerfront $PAGE/title headerback $PAGE/body footer > $PAGE.html".

Like yeah, there's some upfront complexity, but nowhere near the complexity of manually editing these things on each and every page. Once you have these programmed in and scripted out, you get 90% of the useful stuff a SSG does for you with 10% (at most) of the moving parts.

The thing is, I don’t want any generation at all, at least not with my actual HTML pages.

Okay, then don't do any generation. That's fine. Nothing wrong with doing things manually if that's really how you like to do it.

Personally, I'm lazy, and tend to prefer at least a little bit of automation.

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